He met with Pompeo in NY last month before heading to the White House to hand-deliver a letter from Kim Jong Un to Trump.

And until denuclearisation takes place, sanctions against North Korea would remain in place, he stressed.

Managing expectations is one of the oldest games in politics.

He has been involved in the country’s relations with the USA and South Korea for more than two decades.

He travelled to North Korea to visit the dictator in May.

Pompeo’s firm line on sanctions relief suggests that the United States is looking for a short transition toward denuclearization, according to Zhang Baohui, director of the Centre for Asian Pacific Studies at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

North Korea has changed its narrative in recent months. “So you can’t go in unprepared because the North Koreans will open lots of trap doors for you”.

Reunification, he said, would be impossible because four powers – the US, China, Russia and Japan – do not want to see a unified Korea.

This is a very high bar and probably unrealistic after one meeting.

But Mr. Trump noted that negotiations on denuclearization would take more time.

Its state-run media are reporting extensively on Mr Kim’s arrival in Singapore, with KCNA publishing three reports detailing his departure from Pyongyang, arrival in Singapore and meeting with Singaporean Premier Lee Hsien Loong. “This is not the fault of either Trump or Kim, but rather a reflection that intractable, decades-long strategic challenges rarely-if ever-get resolved in single encounters”, Haas writes.

Probably. In fact, Trump has been doing quite a bit of this lately. The statement said Trump now plans to depart Singapore on Tuesday evening (around 8 p.m.) after giving a post-summit news conference, and not Wednesday morning as originally scheduled.

Pompeo has disputed the notion that the president is moving the goalposts, telling reporters that Trump “has always understood that this was a process.”

The Korean War of the early 1950s ended with a ceasefire, not a treaty.

While advisers insist Trump has been reviewing briefing materials, he insists his gut instincts will matter most when he gets in the room with Kim.

“The upcoming summit between President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un stands a decent chance of success, even though the administration has flouted all the traditional rules of good summit planning”, reads the report.

A transport plane – one of three aircraft that headed to Singapore – also carried food and Kim’s bullet-proof limousine. The move was in reaction to North Korea’s criticism of U.S. vice president Mike Pence’s statement that the country could meet the same fate as Libya if it failed to meet a nuclear deal with the US.

Funds for military activities are obtained from remittances that come from the forced labor of North Koreans sent overseas, as well as forced labor domestically.

More than 2,500 journalists are in Singapore to cover the event. “They see denuclearisation as a collective suicide (and they are probably right)”. Pompeo brought him back to the CIA a year ago to run the Korea Mission Center that has played a central role in the run-up to the summit.

Trump said last week that Rodman was not invited to the summit.

But a failure Tuesday doesn’t necessarily mean a return to the animosity of 2017.

The commemorative coin issued ahead of the US-North Korea summit.

Singapore’s Foreign Minister Vivian Balakrishnan also tweeted a picture of them going “jalan-jalan”, a local term meaning to go out for a walk, in the Gardens by the Bay park.